Your energy use may be higher than necessary, and it could be putting your equipment at risk. This probably seems counterintuitive for a virtual server environment; after all, a reduction in equipment should lead to a reduction in power. Yet, after virtualizing, you may have energy inefficiencies relative to your underlying physical infrastructure. This provides an opportunity for continued cost savings and risk mitigation, by optimizing power consumption for your newly architected virtual server environment.
The primary measure of energy efficiency in your datacenter is power usage effectiveness (PUE), reflecting total energy consumption relative to your physical equipment footprint. In a physical server infrastructure, energy consumption and costs are distributed over a larger set of hardware, much of which has loner latency periods. This drives a lower PUE. The equipment utilization efficiencies of a virtual server infrastructure, however, lead to less dormancy because of consolidation. Energy consumption relative to underlying equipment thus increases, elevating PUE.
